Canonical, the firm which makes Ubuntu, has announced that Mozilla has launched Firefox as a snap package. The move will allow Mozilla to deploy updates to user’s browser much more quickly than it currently can via distributions’ repositories. In terms of Ubuntu-based distributions, Firefox updates usually take a few days to come through to users; snap will speed this up greatly.

Jamie Bennett, VP of Engineering, Devices & IoT at Canonical, said:

“Mozilla has long been a leader in the open source space. As such we are very happy to announce that they are joining the community of applications already available as snaps. Through their unique format, snaps can help bring some of the world’s most popular apps to almost any Linux desktop, server, device or cloud machine, allowing users to select the right distro for them without having to worry about updates, security or compatibility issues further down the line.”

According to Canonical, users will be able to test beta or “edge” releases of Firefox using Canonical’s channel system. The channel system will allow you to test new releases, whilst keeping the stable version of Firefox installed too, side-by-side.

Canonical has been hard at work this year pushing out snaps with partners, just this month, it announced that the popular programming language, Kotlin was available as a snap. Snaps allow users to install the latest and greatest bits of software in a secure manner as they’re designed to be sandboxed from the rest of the system, unlike other apps.

In order to grab the Firefox snap package head over to the Snapcraft store.